You belch out something between indignant glare and apathetic stare, delivering it on cue. You are the run down roadside convenience store whose quarts of milk sit stagnant on the bottom racks, consistently sour. I'm living in your backroom icebox somewhere between the indecipherable cubes and wedges. It's positively suffocating me.

I am holding the gas nozzle in my hand and imagine what your lungs must look like. Like the underbelly of my car after we hit the soft wet construction tar five miles back. Like a stretched-out water balloon stained urine-yellow from chemicals I can't even pronounce. Like the smouldering ruins of cities smashed, a rash of ash orbiting the sadsac with which you breathe.

The gasoline has traveled from mysterious metal tanks beneath the concrete through a stretchy opaque tube into the eleven gallon tank. The flow is cut off now; the nozzle has run dry. Yet still I cannot pull out.

You finish your cigarette and flick it away into the cold inconceivable wasteland that lives outside the realm of your immediate needs. Your fingertips were a softpink three nights ago wrapped up in the vortex of my embrace. Now they are yellow and rough, like cheap snakeskin. You know, the kind you see in casino gift shops and desert highway truck stops. The kind hustlers buy wholesale.